The point is that the new products and services that will be created in 2018 will be, as far as I can tell, products and services that will be produced and performed with automation or outsourcing. And the evidence of this is the the fact that the new products and services created in 2008 that I can think of have been produced or performed with automation and outsourcing.
They did result in loss of jobs in those specific industries. And, in the past, new industries and services arose to absorb those workers. The difference is that as new industries and services appear from now they employ as few workers as possible. Any business owner would be crazy to not take advantage of automation and outsourcing. GPS units? Mp3 players? iPhones? Laptops? All are products manufactured on almost completely automated assembly lines in other countries.
I’ll make it easier then. Name some new product categories invented in the last five years that are not created with with automation or outsourcing. Name some that are employing significant amounts of labor. Not prognostication, just find some new, sizable industry that is currently employing large numbers of employees.
Uh… so here’s one problem. The new products that replace those? Yeah, they’ll be outsourced too. But, that doesn’t mean the US loses jobs, because we never had those jobs. The guys who design them, well, I’d be willing to bet that Cupertino’s gonna keep employing people. The thing is that at some point, outsourcing services (design work especially) starts being a losing proposition. Specifically, design and customer service work is not, I think, going to get outsourced anytime soon. I worked for an architecture firm for a while that outsourced some drafting work to India. Problem was, between time delays and language/cultural barriers, it was often more trouble than it was worth. Getting from the client’s ideas to an architect’s designs is hard enough without jumping a couple more people to get to the drafter, and the architect has to be able to meet the client face-to-face. That’s true for a lot of corporate business, too - people want to meet a face. Customer service for the plebes may get outsourced to India, because Microsoft has a big enough market share to not sweat it, but for that sweet Chevron contract, you can bet there’s gonna be someone in the room selling it.
How? They can’t spend it on consumer goods, and aren’t going to invest it for new capacity when there is no demand.
BTW, money, while conserved, does go down a rathole. Consider the inventory written off when the bubble burst. That inventory was supposed to improve productivity, instead a lot of it got scrapped. The economy doesn’t grow by money transfer, but by sound investments improving productivity.
These days they seem to be using fewer employees, because of lack of demand. Sure you hire to meet expected increases in demand - and do the opposite when there won’t be any. I’ve been through plenty of hiring freezes and layoffs in my time.
And there’s the Catch 22. They won’t spend it until there is demand, and there won’t be demand until they start spending it. That’s where the government comes in - inject cash, to start the spending, which gives you more investment, and more spending, and more jobs. Works so long as the companies who get the cash don’t put it under their mattresses.
Now let’s say that I, as the inventor of this net, require that you give me half your catch as a royalty. Since fish are plentiful, it becomes the means of exchange. Our friend makes clothing. I can buy as much of it as I want, but I don’t need all that much. You can’t afford to buy all that much, since you’re giving your fish to me. The maker of clothing soon stops producing any, since the demand is down.
What happened over the past 8 years is that we encourage people to spend their money to improve the economy without giving them much - the adjusted wages for the bottom 90% haven’t budged much. The way they spent the money and kept the economy running was debt - thanks to Greenspan and the housing bubble. Now that credit is gone, no one is spending anything, and the economy is cratering. To get people to spend the money you so rightly say is needed to get the economy going, you need to get them some. The government can print it, or the rich can decide that an increase in the minimum wage (another one) or a transfer of money to those more likely to spend it will work.
You know, this is pointless, you are just not listening and you are just not getting it.
Look for any economic predictions from the 70s. How many predicted the boom which would be caused by the internet, online shopping, google, Amazon, etc. Zero. Nobody could have predicted that. But no one predicted catastrophe.
The fact is that when humens have their present needs met and they have free time they find other things to do and other needs and that creates jobs. that you ask for particular descriptions of the particular jobs is just silly and a childish approach. It’s like asking a waitress why she knows she will get some tips if she cannot name the exact amount beforehand.
To say there will be no jobs is just silly and makes no sense. Is there a need to be fulfilled? Then there is a job to be done. Are all our needs satisfied? Then, what is the problem? Are all the needs of the entire world satisfied? They never will be because people always want more. Two hundred years ago (and indeed today in parts of the world) all you could hope for was to be fed and clothed. That is all people aspired to. And yet when those needs were filled they found other needs they could have not imagined. Even people who have a lot of money and have plenty of time find things to do like play golf or travel or sail boats which require other people to provide them with services.
Fifty years ago Spain was a poor agricultural country and people feared the competition from poorer countries. That was the wrong approach. The answer was not to maintain what could be done cheaper elsewhere but to diversify into more productive activities. Spain went into great industrial production. For a while it was #1 shipbuilder in the world. It developed the tourism industry. Etc. Then the industrial sector was undercut from Asia and the entire and huge shipbuilding industry was lost. So what? Spain’s economy has managed to keep growing to the point where today it is a favored destination of inmigrants from many countries.
Fifty years ago Spain was exporting migrants to other countries and today it is receiving them. In the meanwhile huge sectors of the economy have been born, flourished and died. Had Spain insisted on concentrating in living off the agriculture today it would be worse off than it was 50 years ago. It would be like Cuba.
The point is that we do not know where the opportunities lie. This is like asking me how can I travel to China if I do not know exactly where I will eat or where I will sleep. I do not need to know that because I know and experience tells me that if I carry money I will find restaurants and hotels. I do not need to plan out my menu for every day of my trip as those are details which I will work out along the way. I do not need to know if a particular food will be available because I know that food will be available.
Insisting on naming and describing in detail what the future will be like just shows a very immature level of comprehension. We do not have and we do not need that level of detail to know in general terms how we will develop.
Ask yourself: How many university professors or economic experts think like you? The answer is zero. Then ask yourself why that might be and the answer is that you are looking at the problem the wrong way. If I need to know what I am going to eat every day before I decide to travel to China then I cannot travel to China.
The future will create plenty of jobs. The fact that we cannot say exactly where does not detract from this just like Microsoft, Google, yahoo, Amazon, Intel, etc were created and with them millions of jobs in spite of nobody being able to predict such a thing in 1978.
You are not finding the solution to your question because you are stubbornly insisting on asking the wrong question. This is like just insisting on saying Zeno was correct in his analysis and the hare can never overcome the tortoise. If you insist in looking at it that way then the conclusion may be that it is impossible and yet that is the wrong answer. You need to look at the problem in a different way and just being pigheaded and demanding an answer to the question when the question is wrong just takes us nowhere.
I agree it’s uncontroversial that most current service and manufacturing jobs are headed towards automation. It’s possible that the *overwhelming *majority of current service and manufacturing jobs are headed for automation, but that’s at least somewhat speculative. It’s probable that new types of service and manufacturing jobs will emerge to at least partially replace the current types that will be lost.
You have already been given examples of jobs that are growing. You objected that you were getting speculative information (and, oddly, implicitly insisted therefore on denying that job growth would take place in those areas), but note that there are **three **snapshots on that page: 2002, 2006, and (projected) 2016. Please, take a second look at that list. See all of the manufacturing jobs that are disappearing (or, more accurately, being relocated), and also see all of the non-service-or-manufacturing jobs with double (or triple) digit percentage increases from 2002 to 2006. Imagine all of those people moving from a job they can’t do relatively efficiently (like textile manufacturing) to a job they can do relatively efficiently (like home health care). Progress!
Are you actually asking for examples of obsolete jobs being replaced with jobs that were previously no better than science fiction? I don’t know a way of saying this without any snark, so I’ll just ask: are you making a funny joke? Every other post in this thread gives examples of that.
Then I’ll be the 10th person to ask: What happened to all those farmers? We effectively eliminated an entire category of work (and the largest category at that), and those people found jobs by bolstering extant but relatively smaller categories of work, and eventually by helping to create entirely new categories of work. They did not long remain idle.
It won’t. For one example, shipping can be automated, but guess what, most companies that aren’t FedEx or UPS still hire real people to do shipping tasks.
Circuit boards, plastic housings, metal housings… basically, everything we make gets made in the US. It would be stupid expensive to get it outsourced for no obvious benefit.
What happened to carriage wheel manufacturers? What happened to cotton gin repairers? What happened to seamstresses and loom weaving in your house? Somehow the human race has managed to find even more stuff to do as we automate and increase the population. I feel like you’re asking me to prove that the sky is up. Just look.
Do you have any reason to suggest that they shouldn’t, since you admit it would create a better product for less cost?
Say automation does replace most jobs and most new things can be cheaply automated too. What’d you’d have is a potential Technocracy ideal society, or a potential 3rd world country.
I don’t think the American people would peacefully go into 3rd country status, and automation is heavily dependent on the machines not being destroyed by rioters. So it’d go more Technocratic (maybe not with energy credits though. Rare earth elements used to make magnets that generate electric current, not energy it’s self, which promises to be become scare these days)
So the question becomes how best to implement society so people have access to a decent quality of life. With few jobs and few chances for non machine owners to make money would capitalism work for this? I’d think some kind socialism would he required. Maybe not total but you’d suddenly have a large class of people totally dependent on government intervention for survival.
So in this hypothetical future we have the irony of the capitalistic drive for efficiency leading to socialism.
I’ve tried to stay out of this thread, but I can’t let this slide. You keep saying people are providing academic answers and you want something concrete, but you’re just pulling statements like this out of thin air. Every single new product in the future is going to be outsourced? You can’t think of any new products or services that have been introduced by workers in the US in the last year?
Christ almighty, the US population is increasing and even if every product introduced was outsourced, we’ll still need new services. But many of the new products from companies like Intel, Microsoft and Apple are designed (and some built) in the US. The state college/university system here in CA is bursting at the seams, and needs more faculty and student housing. That isn’t going to be outsourced.
Outsourcing represents a tiny fraction of the total jobs controlled by US companies, not to mention that hundreds of foreign companies set up shop in the US to make and/or sell their products here. Go back and read the responses you’ve gotten in this thread. If you can’t see where your thesis is flawed, then I don’t think any answer is going to satisfy you. Better move to India and learn Hindi real fast.
It seems to me that the OP is seeing doom and gloom in automation, as people have done for the past 200 years. However, most of those responding to him seem to say it won’t be a problem this time since it has never been a problem in the past, which doesn’t reassure me very much. And these side discussions on how the OP is wrong wrong wrong so long as one guy in Santa Clara is still designing processors is just silly.
The history of automation has been moving jobs up the skill chain. Farm automation moved people from grunt labor in the fields to somewhat more skilled labor in factories. Farming is high tech now, but it didn’t used to be. Factory automation moved people into design and engineering and support of more complex tools. We automated the hands, and made the brain more valuable, which improved the standard of living since brains are very productive. But the only place to go when we automate (or outsource) brain jobs is to service jobs which at the moment can’t be automated. These don’t increase productivity like brain jobs do, so they don’t come with big paychecks. (Except for jobs like doctors and lawyers.)
The problem isn’t really productivity, since automation and finding low cost suppliers improves productivity. The problem is how to funnel the benefits of productivity to the average consumer. That’s what the current administration didn’t do, and what Obama is clearly intending in his evil “income redistribution” plan.
Maybe Mack Reynolds had it right. If we stop calling it welfare, and give everyone stock paying dividends, the conservatives will be happy. Perhaps we should send the collected work of Mack Reynolds to Congress. Reynolds, for you non-sfers, was a socialist who the right wing John Campbell loved. Many of his stories were set in a society where many jobs were automated out of existence.
It shifts the debate. If it doesn’t reassure you now, what is so special about now?
Ideally, as you know, competition in the marketplace should resolve this by lowering the cost of goods. I can’t make as much as I did, but I can buy more for less. Real income: about the same. Of course as we’ve talked about in other threads there’s problems here that real incomes aren’t actually reflecting productivity gains, so people are working harder for less. But this may be temporary. It’s not all roses all the time in any economy.
I think the ultimate bone is the two absolute phrases thrown around: that everything will be automated or outsourced (or, one imagines, both). I don’t see this as being even remotely close to true for reasons that are so obvious I can’t even begin to figure out what to say about it. Every homeowner could outsource their laundry but they don’t. Every homeowner can automate their dishes but not all do. The company I work for could easily pay some guy in China to build our circuit boards instead of some folks in New Hampshire but there’s absolutely nothing but costs involved there, as shipping expenses increase and the language barrier could be problematic, to name two things. And sure, we could buy a PCB fab or pick and place machine or god knows what other equipment to make the 50-100 or so boards a year we require but it would make no sense to do so. The costs would have to decrease so much that we’re in the realm of science fiction.
I don’t believe we’re heading towards everything being a commodity. I believe we’re heading deeper into customization and specialization, where the cost savings of automation cannot be realized.
I tried to cover that. Before we pushed jobs up the knowledge scale. Now we are pushing them into the service sector, which in general has lower productivity and is less rewarding. We see that everywhere. When I was a kid, I used fine tuning to home in on a TV signal. Now the TV does it much better. I know my way around computers pretty well, but each new machine I get lowers the amount I have to fiddle with things to set them up. This is all good, but demonstrates my point.
But this was happening when profits were up and the economy was supposedly good. It came from the mindset we see in this thread. Remember how the conservatives kept complaining that Bush wasn’t getting credit for the great economy, and how we responded that the economy wasn’t all that great for most people?
Lowering costs of goods is fine, and you’d be right if costs were directly proportional to labor. But a significant part of product costs is commodity prices. If you cut pay by 10%, you might get product prices declining by only 1% if labor is 10% of the cost and everything else holds steady. it might even increase, like food and gas prices did recently. So things aren’t so simple.
No one around here is immune from hyperbole. Long subthreads demonstrating that there is an exception to absolute statements are pretty pointless.
I agree that customization is the wave of the future - and if you know what a pick and place machine is, you have first hand knowledge - but I think the point is that customized products can be made using the same processes as standard products before, thanks to increasing intelligence on the assembly line. You can see examples in any catalog. I went to the Leatherman factory earlier this year, and the last stage of their process is a laser inscribing machine. In the old days it was set to just inscribe the Leatherman logo, but now it can personalize the tools in lots of 1 with no more process steps.
Everything will be outsourced or automated? Really? Hospitals will have Robotic nurses and doctors and cleaning staff and cooks? And they will be run and managed by a computer? And surgery will be done by machines? Really?
And when your car breaks down you will leave it in an automated workshop where it will be automatically repaired by robots who will then bill your credit card?
And when you go on vacation airports and airplanes and security will be automated? No need for pilots or controllers or cops?
And you will check into an automated hotel where there are no staff, only machines?
When you go to a restaurant the food will be cooked by machines and served by robots?
Trucks will drive themselves along the roads and load/unload themselves?
Machines will build everything we need without human intervention?
Machines will build houses? All by themselves?
And who will design and build all these robots? Other robots?
Will politicians be robots too?
You know, I do not think this is going to happen but if it were to happen I think we could just sit back and relax while robots do all our work.
Yeah. This is the odd thing about the “Ubiquitous automation! Oh noes!” paranoia. If everything was automated, life would be awesome. The goal of employment isn’t exertion for exertion’s sake; it’s to get the things we want. If it turns out we can all get them without needing anyone around to do any work anymore, then “unemployment” becomes “utopian retirement”.
I can only assume you haven’t been paying very close attention then.
Some areas of medicine are essentially performed by robotics right now…you just apparently don’t think of them as such. For instance, if you’re in an intensive care ward, all your vital signs are monitored by automated processes - heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, etc. 50 years ago, that required doctors and nurses to manually perform each check. Now, a small number of nurses can constantly monitor a whole ward full of seriously ill people. Again, a good thing resulting in better patient care and improved outcomes, but also requiring a substantially smaller number of caregivers per patient.
Some types of surgery are heavily robotized, like Lasik. Once the physician has peeled back the outer layer of the eye, the actual lens is reshaped by computer controlled laser. The patient is awake and the eye is not immobilized, and the computer system tracks the position of the eye 4000 times a second. The doctor obviously makes the decisions of how the eye will be re-shaped, but the actual shaping is accomplished with an accuracy and speed beyond any human hand.
The rest of the items on your list? Yes, to all but the managerial and political ones. The links I’ve provided are not to SF, but to current technology. Why haven’t you noticed these things? The only reason I can think of is that you are either not interested in technology, or just haven’t been paying attention.
I think this is excessive, but I admit that I am smelling new things in the wind myself (engineering). I don’t know where we’re heading but common sense tells me it is not to a completely service-oriented economy. (I’m not trying to emphasize the word “completely.”)
Definitely. But when I hear “automation/outsourcing is the future to fear”, in my mind I picture everything being a commodity, because the less something is a commodity, the less incentive there is to automate and outsource it because the possible gains are dubious at best. Some things lend themselves to being a commodity, like a microprocessor. Other things, like software, go both ways. If we can take a commodity like a microprocessor and have millions of groups customize it in millions of ways, sure, it’s a “service”-oriented direction, but that’s probably not what anyone thinks of, they think of retail and fixing/installing equipment and etc.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to nitpick an absolute, but counter a generality with a generality.
But that’s a rather trite example, isn’t it? I mean, that’s like a tiger print for your Guitar Hero controller. I’m thinking of the company I work for, who sells ~50 instruments a year. We cannot be replaced easily, as there’s only so many knowledgeable people in the world to do this stuff (well, I can be replaced, but anyway), and yet there’s never going to be enough demand to take advantage of scale at all. We’re 13 people fulfilling a genuine, but limited, need. We’re not going to be running some massively automated process. Can I imagine some fancy future where this company and companies like it are run by one mastermind and a touchscreen? Sure. But that reality is so different we could draw almost any conclusion.
So when I think of logical conclusions, this is what I imagine, less factories churning out identical widgets and more small businesses adding value to an otherwise faceless mass of widgets.
What jobs? Making computers? Yes, we did. At one point, the vast majority of the computing power in the world was manufactured in the US. Now, the vast majority is manufactured in other countries. Some, for tax reasons, are assembled in the US from parts manufactured in other countries. If those tax incentives don’t overrule the savings from off-shoring? No more US assembly.
Agreed, but the number of designers is a fraction of the number of people required to manufacture those items. It’s been difficult to get anyone on this thread to acknowledge this simple fact.
Agreed, there are some jobs and some situations where outsourcing is not especially workable. But you mentioned drafting. OK, I’m old enough to have learned traditional drafting in high school, and remember architecture firms with whole rooms filled with dozens of people hunched over drafting boards - all of which have been replaced by one or two guys with AutoCad workstations.
I know too many architects and designers working in different countries from the projects they design to believe that it is especially difficult. One client works from her home in Prague for a design firm in Kansas City three months out of the year. One in Lawrence, KS supplied all the architectural metal for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Not debating that. But as fuel costs rose, companies found that they could teleconference a lot more than they had. But this is really far off the main subject - a handful of business people meeting in one place or another compared to outsourcing or automating thousands of jobs out of existence? Not in the same league.
